The Conners Reveals How Roseanne Is Killed Off The Show

Audiences had last seen Roseanne Conner hiding an opioid addiction stemming from knee pain and about to undergo long-delayed, costly surgery.

In the first episode of The Conners, the family is shown struggling to come to terms with the death of Roseanne from what is first thought to be a heart attack but is later revealed to be an opioid overdose.

They find she had been hiding painkillers all over the house, and getting them from a circle of friends who shared medication to avoid costs.

The original Roseanne ran from 1988 to 1997 and was praised for its realistic portrayal of working-class life. The revival in March, in which Barr played a supporter of Republican US President Donald Trump, was ABC's biggest hit, drawing an average 18 million viewers per episode.

The opioid theme at the centre of The Conners could hardly be more topical. Addiction to opioids - mostly prescription painkillers, heroin and fentanyl - has reached epidemic proportions in the United States. According to the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, opioids were involved in more than 49,000 deaths last year.

ABC cancelled Roseanne in May after Barr sparked a furor with a tweet that compared black former Obama administration Valerie Jarrett to an ape.

Barr apologised and said the tweet was political, not racist, in its nature. But she agreed to step away from the show she created and will have no financial or creative involvement in The Conners.

Executive producer Bruce Rasmussen said the makers of The Conners had thought carefully about how to write out Roseanne's character.

"You don't want to be flip about how you do this," Rasmussen told Variety in an interview last week. "A lot of people cared about these characters and it's separate from whatever feelings they had about the person and her political views and the things she said."

The first episode of The Conners ends on a bittersweet note with Dan (Goodman) getting back into the marital bed for the first time in the three weeks since Roseanne's death and reaching out an arm to an empty pillow beside him.